Montessori School of Greater Lafayette Blog

Insights and inspiration from our Montessori classrooms.

We're really reaching back here for Halloween gold - all the way back to 1989. Back in the day, the whole school had a costume parade in the Morton Center gymnasium. It was a big year for bunnies, clowns, and superheroes.

I hope you have enjoyed our first-ever Halloween edition of Wayback Wednesday. If you know anyone in these photos and want to share their names with us (or our website with them) we would really appreciate it. Have fun tomorrow and I hope you get lots and lots of candy - or not. Whichever you prefer :)

1998 was a big year for MSGL because we announced our expansion so we received lots of media coverage. This week's Wayback Wednesday post features another story from the Lafayette Journal and Courier. On July 7th, a story about our summer camp cooking class filled the 4 Kidz Only page. (I love that the J&C embraced phonetic spelling!)

The photos are beautiful and the children's quotes, especially about date math, are really sweet.

Featured teacher,Revati Nemaniis still with MSGL today in the Catalpa class. The children featured in this article are now in college. Are any of them studying to be chefs? We would love to know. If you know Alie Magnante, Daniel Plesniak, Asher Bogdanove, or Andrew Staiger, please pass this along. It would be great to hear from them.

And maybe you and your young ones will give one of these recipes a go? We would love to hear about that, too.

When we remodeled the former Calvary Baptist Church in 2000-2001 to become our Montessori school, we had to replace a few fixtures. The steeple was detached from the roof and lowered by crane to the parking lot below.

What do you do with a second-hand steeple? We gave it to a church down the road.

The demolition crew also removed the fiberglas baptistry by cutting it into pieces. All of the beautiful wood pews were sold. You can see one being used today in the school office. The colored windows were eventually replaced with clear glass.

15 years ago the Lafayette Journal and Courier announced MSGL's plans to add an elementary program and move all of its programs to a new space.

The Morton Community Center on Chauncey Avenue had been MSGL's home since 1985.

As the article states, the new elementary program was originally going to be housed in a home on Rainbow Drive that had been donated by an MSGL family. A change of plans relocated that first class to some available classroom space inside the Temple Israel on Cumberland Avenue.

In February 2001, all of our programs, from the parent-infant class through elementary, moved into our permanent home in the former Calvary Baptist church on Soldiers Home Road.

In 2007, the elementary classes moved into the Montessori House, a remodeled home adjacent to the campus.

MSGL has plans to expand once again in the near future to add a second toddler classroom and a gym/gross motor space.